“Since the summons was served first, I announce my intention to comply with it, and travel to Carthage City by the assigned date.”

  “But you are under arrest, sir,” said Cavil Planter, as quietly as he could.

  The captain said, “Now Mr. Cavil Planter, the process server, reminds Alvin Smith that he is under arrest.”

  “I agree,” said Alvin. “I am most certainly under arrest. But the highest court in Crystal City issues me a temporary release under my own…”

  “Recognizance,” said Verily Cooper.

  “Recognizance,” said Alvin.

  “The highest court in Crystal City?” said Planter. “Any court in this place is illegal, since the charter was obtained by fraud.”

  Verily held the open warrant up for Planter to read. “You are not a lawyer, sir. The legality of the charter of Crystal City is a matter to be determined by a court of law. At present, Crystal City has a charter, and its highest court still has the authority to nullify this warrant. But the court has elected to honor the warrant, but merely allow the arrestee a period of free movement to get his affairs in order. He will present himself before the Carthage City judge in fulfillment of the summons and the arrest warrant.”

  The captain now relayed Verily’s words to the crowd. No doubt many people assumed that Alvin would use this stay to escape to safety, but Alvin dispelled that notion entirely. “I give you my solemn oath,” he said, “that I will appear in Carthage City on the first day of November. In the meantime, I assure you that I will not leave the boundaries of the city in any direction, by land or by water. But all of this cooperation I offer is contingent.”

  “Upon what, sir?” asked Planter.

  “That the harassment and marauding of Crystal City stop right now.”

  “Cease forthwith,” said Marty Laws.

  “If any damage, violence, mayhem, or terrorizing is done to any citizen of Crystal City, then my cooperation is withdrawn and I will appear only in defense of the people of Crystal City.”

  “You are under arrest, sir!” Planter insisted.

  “If your people continue their unprovoked attacks on the citizens of this city, my retaliation will be swift and sure. And unlike Mike Fink here, I believe my threat is absolutely clear, and will be carried out, if we are given cause.”

  Planter was about to express even more outrage, but at that moment, the saddle on Planter’s horse slid to one side and fell to the ground.

  “Too bad,” said Mike Fink. “Looks like you’re going to need me to clear people out of your way while you lead your horse. I’ll carry your saddle for you. Fair enough?”

  Whether Planter thought that it was Mike Fink’s knack or Alvin’s that loosened the saddle and made it fall, this demonstration of power was a healthy reminder, apparently, of who Planter was dealing with.

  Witches.

  Planter took his horse by the bridle and led it in a turn, with the crowd falling back out of the horse’s way. Meanwhile, Mike Fink picked up the saddle and took his place in front of Planter.

  The other two riders also turned their horses. And the parade proceeded, led by Mike Fink. The crowd opened before him, and while the looks directed at Planter were far from friendly, nobody raised a hand or said a word against him.

  As soon as the parade got through the last of the crowd, where the rest of the troop—and the prison wagon—awaited them, Mike Fink dropped the saddle and took Cavil Planter by the upper arm and propelled him toward the jail wagon.

  “What are you doing? Where are you taking me?”

  “To the place of honor in this assembly,” said Mike Fink. Planter was now resisting, but Mike Fink dragged him along like a bratty toddler who refused to walk. “I need this wagon opened,” said Mike Fink loudly.

  Nothing happened. Nobody spoke.

  Until Cavil Planter said, “It isn’t locked.”

  “I will not believe that until I hold the key in my hand.” He looked at one man after another. Finally, one of them dismounted and handed Mike Fink the key. “You’ll see it isn’t locked, sir,” the man said.

  Mike dragged Planter to the door and pulled it open. “Why, it really wasn’t locked,” he said. “In you go, Mr. Planter.”

  “I will not!” he shouted, as Mike Fink lifted him from the ground and gently placed him supine within the jail wagon. Then Mike Fink closed the door of the jail wagon and, quite ostentatiously, locked it. “Yes, Mr. Planter. You thought this was the proper conveyance to carry the mayor of Crystal City two hundred miles along rough roads. So how can you complain if you, a mere immigrant and slave rapist, are conveyed by the same means?”

  Mike turned to the members of Planter’s troop. “I assume there is another key back in Carthage City?”

  Several nods.

  “It will occur to you to break Mr. Planter out of this wagon as soon as you’re out of sight from Crystal City. But that’s your mistake, my lads. Nothing is out of sight from Crystal City. The very walls will show everything that you do, all the way back to Carthage City, and if this prison wagon is opened before you get there, you won’t have to deal with Alvin Maker, you’ll also have to deal with the rip-snortingest, strongest, meanest, and most malicious varmint between the Appalachees and the Mizzippy. And that’s me, when I’m riled up. Don’t even imagine that you’ll be too far for me to get to you. I know there’s a passel of you, but only a couple or three of you at a time can get near enough to fight me, and I fight three men at a time just for exercise.” The men did not seem to doubt his brag.

  “Also,” Mike went on, “the only reason I don’t gouge out eyes and bite off noses and ears when I fight these days is because Alvin asked me not to. But I’m sure he’ll forgive me for making an exception in this case, so we can find out if any of you can possibly be made uglier.”

  They looked at Mike in horrified fascination.

  “If any of you doubt me, I’ll take on any three of you just for fun, right now.”

  “Just for fun?” asked the man who probably thought he was the toughest in Planter’s troop.

  “Well, it’ll be fun for me,” said Fink. “Not so much for you, what with losing body parts.”

  “We have guns,” said another man.

  “Do you now?” said Mike Fink. “That’s just an oversight. Please drop all your weapons and ammunition on the ground. If you don’t want to, I can assure you that Alvin Maker can make you very sorry, even at a little distance.”

  When all the guns and ammunition were on the ground, Mike led the horses pulling the wagon around in a wide circle, so it ended up on the road back out of town. “Remember to tell folks back in Carthage that you not only met Alvin Maker, but you also met the wildest, toughest, meanest bobcat-strangler on the Hio and six other rivers west of the Appalachees.”

  “And that would be you?” scornfully asked the man who had previously seemed inclined to want to test Mike’s offer to fight any three of them.

  “Ask me that question again,” said Mike Fink, “and in three seconds I’ll have you off that horse with both your eyeballs popped and squishy, with my thumbs in your sockets.”

  The man wheeled his horse and moved to the front of the caravan, right ahead of the jail wagon. Cavil Planter was gripping the bars on the back of the wagon, weeping but making no sound.

  “Remember, folks, I ain’t got me a knack, so nobody used any kind of witchery against you! You tell the truth about that, and I won’t have to come after you and kill you.”

  The troop rode off. Mike Fink watched until they were gone.

  Only then did Mike notice that the showboat captain had followed him to the edge of the crowd, and while Mike was shouting his brag and his threats, the captain was relaying every word of it to the whole assemblage.

  So the crowd definitely cleared a path for Mike, and made sure that he knew they approved highly of his words and actions.

  Meanwhile, back at the coffins, Alvin said, “Can we begin the ceremonies now? We want everybody to get home in time for supper.”

  While everyone took their places, and the families of the slain citizens came forward to lay flowers on the coffins, Marty asked Verily, “Who is the supreme judicial authority of Crystal City?”

  Verily, without smiling, gestured toward Alvin. “It’s in the charter. The mayor is the supreme justice of the peace in Crystal City.”

  “He had the authority to override the warrant?”

  “Did they obey him?” asked Verily. “Then he had the authority.”

  33

  WHOEVER WAS IN charge of the marauders, they apparently had iron control over the so-called mob. The harassment stopped. Well, the burning and stealing and beating and terrorizing stopped. Every day, somewhere around the fringes of Crystal City, a few riders would come along one of the roads or traces and then stop in front of somebody’s house, looking at it. Mothers called their children inside from the yard. Usually a man came out with a musket or blunderbuss or shotgun and stood there watching the riders. Before long all the neighbors were out in their dooryards or on their porches, also armed. But not a shot was fired. And after a while, the riders would go back the way they came.

  On both sides, the message was received. We’re not done with you knackles, the marauders were saying. We won’t let you run over us unscathed, said Crystal City. But the truce held.

  Margaret was having meetings most every day, folks from this group or that, coming to confer with her about practical things like where and how to get a wagon or at least a cart to pull their belongings along by hand. How much flour and lard or oil to prepare. How to get a horse when they had little money.

  Eliza was having her own meetings, organizing the Irish into small companies of ten families, with someone in charge of each. Several of the groups were headed by a woman, and in each case it was a woman so formidable that no sober man would dare to complain about being led by a female.

  Arthur Stuart was organizing all the other knackles into companies. He didn’t push his luck the way Eliza had. All his companies were headed by men. He had men hewing wood and setting it out to season during the months they had.

  All these preparations for the exodus across the river were done pretty openly. A few of the people tried to sell their farms or shops to people from outside the city, but the offers were so low they couldn’t even buy a spavined nag strong enough to pull a dogcart. Several knackles offered to trade a completely furnished house for a horse, and a few half-decent folks, knowing they were cheating the witches but willing to let them gain some value from their possessions, agreed, and many of the horses they got in trade were good enough to make the journey.

  With a couple of others, the knackle couldn’t help commenting, “We’ll be eating this one before we get very far,” to which the outsider said, “Yours to do with as you please, as my new house here will be for me to use.”

  Nobody bought or traded for any of the shops, though some made a deal for the shop’s stock. “No point getting a shop in a town that pretty soon isn’t going to have any people in it,” said one outsider. “Where’s my custom, where’s my trade?”

  Crystal City had been prosperous, trading up and down the Noisy River country. But there was no trade now, when the people needed it most. The shopkeepers couldn’t get credit, so their shelves had emptied out, with no new stock to fill them.

  Alvin took no part in the selling, buying, building, stocking. He talked a couple of fellows with a knack for wheelwrightry into making the best wheels they could out of wood that was still too green to be worked properly. “Can’t promise they’ll hold up,” said one of them. “Will they carry a family’s supplies over the river?” asked Alvin. “You didn’t ask me to make a boat, Alvin. You asked for wagon wheels.”

  Mostly, though, Alvin went about talking to folks about their knacks, how everybody needed to help. About the Good Samaritan, and how everybody going into the West was going as the Crystal City, not a bunch of strangers or rivals. It wasn’t exactly preaching. Alvin was just letting them know what was expected.

  He deflected questions. When will we leave? How will we cross the river? Are you sure the Reds won’t massacre us just like Tippy-Canoe? I’m no hunter, Alvin, how can I feed my family?

  “Well, that’s what Arthur Stuart is working on. I heard him say something about every company having a couple of designated hunters to try for a deer a week, or a buffalo every couple of weeks.”

  “I never et buffalo,” said one woman. “And I sure never roasted it.”

  “From what I hear,” said Alvin, “it roasts up pretty much like beef, except a little tougher. Make sure you bring your best teeth.” That got him a laugh, because it was a joke he only made to people as had teeth.

  What they didn’t know was that when he visited each family, he looked at whatever they had in the way of a cart or wagon, and strengthened and sealed all the joints, and made the axles and hubs work smooth. Wherever rats were trying to get into the food, Alvin got them to move away, out of the city limits, because they couldn’t afford to share their supplies with varmints. Nobody even noticed that rats weren’t a problem this fall, after the harvest. Too busy being afraid of the marauders, afraid to go off into untracked wilderness.

  “Will there be stout?” asked more than one Irishman. “Lager? Beer?”

  “Well, that’s a good question,” said Alvin. “Do you know how to brew it?”

  To those who said yes, or maybe, or more or less, Alvin said, “We’ve got a few barrels of barley grain and a bag or two of hops. Think you can work with that?”

  They said yes, and it seemed that they were much relieved. Here they were in this good rich land where there was plenty to eat, no famine, no blight—but Irishmen had to know they could have a pint now and then. Besides, Alvin was relieved that none of them asked about making good whisky. Maybe they knew that a bit of beer wouldn’t hamper them on the journey, but a serious whisky drunk would lay them out and slow down the whole caravan.

  Alvin had a good talk with Arthur Stuart. “I’m not fit to do this, Alvin. You better be there all the time to back me up.”

  “I’ll try,” said Alvin. “But you’ve been doing a splendid job so far. People seem content and nobody’s grumbling about anything they might fancy you done wrong.”

  “They don’t want to complain to you.”

  “Who else can they complain to? Margaret tells me that nobody is harboring resentment or disdain for you and your efforts. You chose your company captains well. But here’s something you might not have thought of. You get to the other side, you need to get inland a ways and make a camp. Build log cabins or sod houses, because when winter comes, these wagons ain’t going nowhere till spring.”

  “Cabins?”

  “We got so many people as know how to build cabins you’ll not even need to put anybody in charge of it. When spring comes, you don’t all go at once—there wouldn’t be enough pasturage for the horses on the way. You space them out, a couple of days between companies, and following traces a couple of miles apart.”

  “We don’t know the land,” said Arthur Stuart.

  “Then it’s a good thing Tenskwa-Tawa won’t ask any of you to scout out your own paths. You’ll have Red guides. Good men you can trust. In the walls of the city, I’ve seen there are times you’ll have to lower wagons over an escarpment by ropes, and then pull them up the other side of the ravine. Hard work, slows you down, but in the spring there’s no hurry—you don’t want to get to the mountains when they’re still deep in snow.”

  Arthur nodded. He listened, he took everything in. He knew that Alvin was telling him everything he could, but he couldn’t tell what he didn’t know. Arthur Stuart also refrained from asking, And what will you be doing while I’m supervising the migration? He knew Alvin would be doing what was needed, as he always did.

  As long as he didn’t do something insane like going to Carthage City to turn himself over to the authorities. Arthur Stuart knew Alvin had given his oath, but if he and all of Crystal City was over the river before that day, what were the mobbers and murderers going to do about it?

  Another thing Alvin did was have little Vigor with him every chance he could. Sometimes he’d hoist the boy on his shoulders, but other times they’d walk together as Alvin taught him to hear the Greensong and move with it. Alvin couldn’t guess what knack the boy might have, if any, but he could hear the Greensong as long as Alvin was with him, and so when it was just the two of them, both walking, they could get all the way around the city in half an hour or less.

  It was mid-October, and the city was readier than Alvin had expected to make their journey. Arthur was starting to nag him, and Verily and John Binder, too, that he needed to get things moving so he wasn’t still in town on the first day of November. Alvin just smiled.

  Measure never plagued Alvin about such things. Alvin hadn’t told him what he was going to do, but he figured Measure already knew. He had eyes and a brain, and he didn’t let himself get distracted by what he wished would happen.

  And Measure, too, had his three children with him pretty much all the time. He knew.

  Calvin knew nothing, except that he hated the idea of being left behind. “Not my choice,” said Alvin. “Tenskwa-Tawa said that if you made the midpoint of the river, you’d fall out of whatever boat you were in, and have to swim back to the east bank.”

  “What does he have against me? What did I ever do to him?”

  “He doesn’t trust you,” said Alvin.

  “Why not?” demanded Calvin. “What you mean is you don’t trust me!”

  “Well, of course I don’t trust you, Calvin. I’d have to be six kinds of stupid to trust you.”

  That seemed to sting, and Calvin recoiled. “Haven’t I told you everything I found out from the conspirators?”

  “I’d rather you hadn’t known any of the conspirators, or what they were planning,” said Alvin. “But that’s water under the bridge, so to speak. Stay behind here and make a good life for yourself. Marry. Have children. Keep them safe.”

  Calvin was bursting to say something else. Alvin waited until Calvin was ready to say it. “When they find out I’m a Maker, they’ll want to kill me the way they want to kill you!”